It had been an unreal, magical day, tucked away from the rain in Toni’s homely living room. No TV, no Facebook, no contact with the outside world at all. No way of knowing whether Ricky was dead or alive.
I couldn’t hide for ever.
But for now – this was as good a place as any. Good company and plenty of distraction. From what I could see there wasn’t likely to be anything stronger than alcohol on the agenda either, which was probably a good thing. I knew it couldn’t last – I’d been invited for the weekend, and then I supposed I’d move on. Somewhere.
6
‘No,’ Toni said next morning. ‘Staying in’s not an option.’ And she actually put her hands on her hips. ‘You can’t go home tonight and not have seen anything but the inside of my house.’
I tried not to process go home tonight. It was only 10 a.m.
Outside it felt colder than Dublin but maybe that was just because autumn was coming. Breathing in the cool, damp northern air chased away the hangover of wine and music. On Friday night I’d seen nothing except street lights, pub signs and the usual kind of city stuff. Now, walking down Toni’s street, I could see that her area was middle-class and quiet – red-brick Victorian houses, small front gardens. We got to a main road, where the shops were mostly shut, but one or two cafés were open. The postboxes were red instead of green like at home, which looked weird.
Nobody gave me a second glance. It’s not that I was arrogant enough to think I only had to step into the street to be papped. But if there was anything about Ricky in the papers, and if I was mentioned as a suspect – well, it might bring me back into people’s minds, that’s all.
‘You don’t have to walk me all the way there,’ Marysia said, when a large red-brick church loomed into view on the other side of the road. ‘You could take Cal for a coffee, or go for a walk in the park or something.’
‘Can you come back to mine after Mass?’ Toni asked. ‘We’ll wait for you in Kopi.’
Marysia shook her head. ‘Homework. Sunday lunch. No, you show Cal round Belfast.’
When Marysia had gone it felt a bit crackly between Toni and me, and I wasn’t sure why.
‘OK, you have to see Belfast,’ she said. She put her hands in her jacket pockets. ‘Let’s see. We could get a bus—’
Before she could organise me into a guided tour with compulsory exam afterwards, I said, ‘What’s Kopi?’
‘It’s a café. It’s the Indonesian word for coffee.’
‘You have Indonesian cafés in Belfast?’
‘Well – no,’ she admitted. ‘I think they just thought it was a cool name.’
‘So can we start there?’
It was like a café anywhere – I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t be, but that first day in the Belfast streets I expected everything to be different. It was crowded in the same way Dublin cafés were on Sunday mornings – with families ignoring their kids, and couples looking at their phones and ignoring each other, and groups of people our age trying to make Saturday night last longer. The steamy air smelled of coffee and what I later learned was the Ulster fry. We got our coffees at the counter. I offered to pay but they didn’t take euros, and I felt really stupid because of course I knew they used sterling up north, I’d just forgotten. Toni was OK about it, though; she said I’d earned a coffee with all my music tutoring. She squinted into the fug. ‘There’s a table in the corner,’ she said.
Someone had left a Sunday paper behind. It must have been a Northern paper, because I didn’t recognise it. The front page headline was about a sex scandal with a politician I’d never heard of, but who knew what might be inside? I swept it away, but Toni stopped me.
‘Give it here. That paper’s full of crap but it has good gig reviews.’ She opened it and scanned it.
‘Have you done many actual gigs?’
She shook her head. ‘We did a showcase after the summer school we did in July. But that’s it.’ She frowned. ‘I know we need more practice. But I don’t know where to get it.’
‘There must be open mic nights and stuff.’ I took the paper from her and scanned it. ‘OK – what about this?’ I read out the details of an open mic night, but when she heard the name of the pub her eyes widened. ‘No way, Dublin boy! Wrong part of town.’
‘OK.’ I kept looking. ‘What about this? The Bluebell? That doesn’t sound rough. Open mic night, Wednesday. Solo acts and bands welcome.’
‘School night.’
‘That’s not very rock and roll!’
Toni laughed. ‘I suppose we could go this week, when my mum’s away.’
She stirred sugar into her coffee and when she looked up her hazel eyes were shining. ‘I never really believed we had a chance. I only said I’d do Backlash because Marysia was so keen and because I wanted to show that two girls could be an awesome band. Only deep down I knew we weren’t awesome enough. You need to be twice as good if you’re a girl, to get taken seriously.’ She frowned and fiddled with her spoon. ‘But now – we sound so much better. It feels like it could really happen.’
She didn’t say what it was. I didn’t say it had already happened for me and it hadn’t lasted long. But then Toni and Marysia weren’t as stupid as me. Look how they’d known when to stop drinking last night. Even after being in there, I’d probably just have kept drinking until I passed out, left to my own devices.
‘So – is it a TV thing? Like X Factor or something?’ I carefully didn’t mention PopIcon. Defunct after a season, though apparently the franchise was still going on some cable station in America.
‘Oh my God. Did you not listen?’ She actually shuddered. ‘No. That’s the whole point. It’s not about TV and image and getting famous quick and then being forgotten about. Deservedly.’ She screwed up her face, her look of disgust making it very obvious I could never mention PopIcon or RyLee, not just because of Ricky. So I said, ‘Um, yeah,’ which probably ranked alongside ‘Jenny’ in my list of articulate moments.
‘The clue’s in the name – it’s a backlash against all that shit. Real music for real people. So no – no TV; no autotuners; no deliberately staged televised auditions for the chronically deranged so we can all laugh at them—’
‘Some of them are actually funny. Don’t tell me you’ve never laughed.’ At least I hadn’t been chronically deranged.
‘I’ve never laughed. Well, not since I was about ten.’
I believed her.
‘It’s for people who care about music,’ she said. ‘About writing songs and sharing them. Having something real to say.’ Her eyes were suddenly serious. ‘Not about being famous, or being on TV, or being rich.’
‘But it’s a competition? You want to win? So what’s the difference?’
She sighed. ‘Cal,’ she said. I still felt weird every time she called me that. ‘Do you really need me to spell it out?’
I kind of did, but at the same time I didn’t want her to go over it all, and probably do me a diagram, so I said, ‘No, I get it.’
She took out her phone and fiddled with it, then handed it to me. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘That’s their website.’
I took it. A second later I was thinking, I’m online. I could google Ricky and see if there’s anything – well, anything. Toni wouldn’t know.
She was reading something about the Northern Irish Assembly with much comment, most of which I didn’t understand. It occurred to me that Toni and Marysia, as well as being sensible and creative and hot, were probably quite a bit brighter than me.
I might as well know the worst.
If you’ve ever googled Ricky Nolan you’ll know his website is all about how great he is. I mean, the guy’s a promoter so obviously he starts with promoting himself. There’s a lot of heart-warming crap about his rise from humble roadie to being one of the biggest managers in Irish pop. Quite a bit about him marrying Louise Callaghan, former member of a girl band you’ve definitely never heard of, whose ‘career’ took a tumble when she became a single mum (to me). Loads abou
t his involvement as a judge on PopIcon; how he swore he only got together with my mum after I’d won the show; how he became my manager, and how he absolutely had not groomed me before I won the contest.
That’s not what I was looking for.
I was looking for the story of how he’d been found dead in a pool of his own blood at his luxury south Dublin home on Friday afternoon, having sustained a blow to the head. I was looking for the story of how gardaí were searching for the only suspect, his stepson Ryan Lee Callaghan, also known as Ryan Lee, or RyLee. Former PopIcon winner. Former almost-star. Former drug user, hell-raiser and general waster.
It wasn’t there. The most up-to-date story was last month’s claim (hotly denied by Ricky) that he’d been sleeping with one (or possibly all) of the members of girl-band pop-sensation Sweet Treat. I scrolled on to the next page and the next – but there was nothing.
I wasn’t a murderer. I could go home.
‘Oy,’ Toni said. ‘You’re not just checking the Backlash website because it’s only a page. So could you not use my phone to do whatever you’re doing? There’s no Wi-Fi in here. Use your own phone.’
‘Sorry.’ I went back to the Backlash page in case she checked, and handed her phone back. ‘I haven’t got one,’ I said, remembering the dramatic gesture of throwing it into the Liffey. It seemed pointless now. But I’d been so scared. And I had left him unconscious and bleeding. So even though I most probably wasn’t a murderer, and didn’t really need to be a hundred miles away with an assumed identity and no phone, that didn’t mean that I’d be welcomed with open arms.
‘How can you not have a phone?’
I was about to say I’d lost it when I changed my mind. Might as well appear interesting and alternative. ‘I don’t need to be tied down like that,’ I said. ‘You know – possessions; plans. Sometimes it’s good to just step off the path and look round you a bit.’ I had no idea where that shit came from.
Toni shook her head. ‘I thought my dad was an old hippie, but you – are you for real?’
‘Yeah.’
Apart from the false identity.
But weirdly, even inside the web of lies and omissions, I felt more honest than I had for ages. And free.
‘So you’re a free-spirited troubadour?’ I liked the sound of that. ‘Are you against money and capitalism and everything?’
‘Definitely not against money. In fact – can we go to a cashpoint?’ It would be a quick way to get sterling. I couldn’t sponge off Toni all day.
The cashpoint told me there was a problem with my card. Please contact your branch. I stared at it in disbelief. I pressed random buttons but the card wouldn’t come back out of the slot. I punched the wall but all that got me was sore knuckles.
‘What’s wrong?’ Toni said. She was behind me but not close enough to see the screen.
‘Maybe I forgot my PIN,’ I mumbled.
I knew I hadn’t. It was my birthday – 2201. Which meant – what? A glitch with the machine? Trouble was, the machine had my card so I couldn’t try it anywhere else. Had my account been hacked or something while I’d been camping out in a stranger’s life? Or could this be something to do with Ricky?
Whatever it was, I couldn’t do anything about it on a Sunday morning. Might as well just give myself up to the day.
Belfast on a September Sunday: smaller than I’d expected. And prettier, especially when you looked up above the shop fronts, which Toni kept ordering me to do. Lots of red brick and stone. The white marble City Hall was like a wedding cake. We passed a sign for the bus station. My steps slowed. ‘You don’t actually have to go home tonight,’ Toni said, as if she could read my mind. ‘My mum’s not home until Friday. Unless you’ve got stuff to get back for?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing important.’
If I hung round, made myself useful musically and in any other way the girls wanted, it could fill up a week very nicely. Give the now-almost-certainly-not-dead Ricky a chance to calm down. Give me a chance to figure out what I was going to do next.
‘I’ll be at school all day. But you could – I dunno – hang out in the city. You should go and see the Titanic museum; it’s brilliant. And—’
She rattled off an itinerary of worthy stuff that I knew I’d never visit, while I zoned out and tried to work out if the girls here looked any different from Dublin girls. Outside the university, a foreign woman thrust a Big Issue at us. I sidestepped automatically.
‘—and of course the best thing about the Ulster Museum is it’s totally free,’ Toni was saying, pointing out something white on our left.
‘Are you a cool indie rock chick or a hopeless geek?’ I asked.
She play-punched me. ‘I’m a devastatingly cool distillation of all that is best of both,’ she said. ‘And don’t call me a chick. It’s degrading.’ But she grinned, and her little diamond nose stud glittered, and I hoped my week of camping in her life wouldn’t go too quickly.
7
Apart from the nagging worry/guilt about Ricky, it was the best week ever: hanging out at Toni’s, seeing her every day, playing music every night – after she’d done her homework; she was super focused on that. Her mum was at some conference in London – she was a teacher in a further education college – and not due back till Friday. I wasn’t letting myself think about after Friday. In there we were supposed to focus on the here and now – let go of the past, and not fret about the future. So that’s exactly what I was doing.
On Wednesday I found some lyrics lying on the coffee table, in Toni’s neat, bold handwriting:
Thank you for giving me your secret self.
Don’t worry that I’d ever tell someone else.
Thank you for showing the person you are.
I won’t let anyone darken your star.
I didn’t know exactly what it was about, but as soon as I read it I could hear the right melody in my head. By the time Toni got in from school I had it worked out. ‘And I know you didn’t write a chorus,’ I said. ‘But I thought, what about this?’
Alarm flickered across her face and I could see her remembering, ‘Jenny, Jenny, Jenny.’
‘It’s not meant to have a chorus,’ she said.
‘It’d make it more catchy.’
‘It’s not meant to be catchy.’
I shrugged. ‘Your song. You want to go to that open mic thing tonight?’
She shook her head. ‘Marysia has a test tomorrow. And don’t tell me that’s not very rock and roll. She’s coming to practise tomorrow night.’ She looked round the room. There were books and papers and guitars and glasses and plates everywhere. ‘We should really tidy up,’ she said.
‘Let’s do it all in one big go on Friday,’ I suggested. Tidying up would mean accepting that the week was going to end and I was going to have to go somewhere and do something.
On Thursday Marysia listened critically to the new song, her head on one side. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you made a song out of something so personal … OK’ – she became business-like – ‘go back to the beginning so I can put in the bass line.’
Toni was singing, but she still needed to look at the words, and she had trouble doing that and playing guitar at the same time, so she kept making mistakes. ‘Sorry,’ she said, after she’d played an E instead of an A and Marysia winced.
‘Just sing,’ I said. ‘Let Marysia hear how it’s meant to be.’
It sounded OK with just the lead guitar and the bass underpinning her voice. Toni’s strumming hadn’t added much.
‘It’s – fine,’ Marysia said, but she sounded unsure, twirling a long lock of hair round her finger. ‘But I think it needs something. A chorus, maybe?’
‘I’ve been trying to tell her that,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about something like this …’ I played her some rough chords, humming a melody.
‘Yes!’ Marysia said. ‘That’s exactly what it needs.’ She looked at us approvingly. ‘Nice collaborating.’
Toni groaned. ‘But t
hat’s not what I—’
‘So if we ever make an album we’ll have to credit you as a co-writer,’ Marysia said. She was all shiny. ‘It’ll be like Lennon and McCartney, only it’ll be Flynn, Nowalczyk and – what’s your surname, Cal? Cal?’ She waved her hand in front of my face.
‘Uh – Ryan,’ I said. ‘Cal Ryan.’
‘Well, this song would just be Flynn and Ryan,’ Toni pointed out. ‘Which sounds – ugh – like an Irish folk duo.’ She wrinkled her nose.
‘Why does she hate folk so much?’ I asked Marysia.
‘Because of her dad,’ Marysia said. ‘That’s his thing. And Anto – well, he’s quite sweet, but he’s a bit of an underachiever in the parenting department.’
‘It is not because of him.’ Toni looked pink and cross. ‘And he is not sweet.’ She looked round the untidy living room. ‘It wouldn’t have hurt you to do some clearing up today while I was at school,’ she said.
‘Sorry – I thought we agreed—’
And then we heard a key turn in the front door, and a voice call, ‘Toni? I’m back.’
8
There must have been a taxi, but we didn’t hear it because of the music.
Toni’s mum was not still safely in London but standing in the living room doorway, looking with horror at the mess of plates, glasses, guitars, scribbled song sheets, DVD cases, bottles – oh yes, and one complete stranger (male).
The girls just sat there, gaping. She didn’t look like Toni. She was tall, and dark, and very cross.
‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘I mean – hello.’
‘Toni? What—?’
‘Mum! You’re not meant to be home yet! I was – we were going to tidy up. We were literally just about to …’
Marysia scrambled to her feet, setting her bass down carefully. ‘Um – we’re so sorry. We were just practising.’
Practising what? Toni’s mum’s face said.
I stood up and walked over to her, instinctively going into RyLee charm offensive. I was usually pretty good with mums, especially the single ones. ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Cal. I’ve been helping the girls with their music. We sort of got a bit involved. With the music, I mean. We’ll tidy up this moment.’ I held my hand out. I shook my hair out of my eyes, cocked my head slightly, smiled ruefully, eyes wide in a puppyish way that didn’t often fail.
Street Song Page 4
